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Office Hours: Peter Balakian Publisher New Collection Of Poems

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  • Office Hours: Peter Balakian Publisher New Collection Of Poems

    OFFICE HOURS: PETER BALAKIAN COLGATE PROFESSOR PUBLISHER NEW COLLECTION OF POEMS
    By Nate Lynch

    Colgate Maroon News
    http://www.maroon-news.com/news/office-hours-peter-balakian-1.1733661
    Oct 28 2010
    NY

    Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor in Humanities and Professor
    of English and Director of Creative Writing Peter Balakian recently
    published Ziggurat, a book of poetry dealing with a number of topics
    from Balakian's life including the September 11 terrorist attacks.

    Ziggurat was published by the University of Chicago press on the
    ninth anniversary of the Sep­tember 11 attacks, and is available at
    the Colgate University Bookstore.

    After the September 11 attacks, Balakian became preoccupied with the
    idea of the towers and their absence. Balakian had been a mail-runner
    in Lower Manhattan and was delivering mail when the first 49 floors
    of the World Trade Towers opened in 1970.

    "After 9/11 I got interested in the ab­sence of the World Trade Towers
    and the Big Hole in Manhattan that was left from the attacks. I was
    haunted by what their beauty was and by their absence."

    Balakian began work on his new book in 2003. His engagement with 9/11
    culmi­nates in a 43-section poem titled "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy"
    and a shorter series called "The World Trade Center/Mail Runner"
    po­ems. The sequential poem was a departure from his previous works.

    "In 'A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy' I tried to explore the life of a character
    in a poem that deals with Manhattan from the late '60s through 2006,
    in which among other things, the building and description of the
    World Trade Towers are central images," Balakian said. "I think one
    of the challeng­es in this new book is working with this new form
    of a sequential poem; 43 sections that work in a fragmental and
    lyrical way."

    The book also engages with a variety of other scenes and concepts
    important to Bal­akian, including Andy Warhol, Emily Dick­inson
    and the ruins of the Bosnian National Library (destroyed during the
    Bosnian War of 1992-1995).

    "I have continued to be engaged with the aftermath of historical
    violence (genocides, terrorist attacks)," Balakian said. "Among oth­er
    things, these are the zones that matter to my writing both as a poet
    and prose writer."

    The title "Ziggurat" unifies many of these ideas and provides a way
    of thinking about them, as the poems contain many allusions to the
    ancient Sumerian civilization and its great temples, called Ziggurats.

    "[The Ziggurat at Ur, in southern Iraq today], is often called the
    first great sky­scraper in Middle Eastern and Western his­tory; it was
    built by the Sumerians around five thousand years ago," Balakian said.

    "It means 'great building' in Aramaic. I found it a rich trope for
    thinking about great monu­ments of architecture and great monuments
    of civilization. It became a trope for think­ing, in certain oblique
    ways, about the loss and recovery of human achievements."

    Ziggurat was praised highly by critics, who applauded both its poetic
    construction and synthesis of historical and personal ap­proaches
    to the poems. Essayist and literary critic Sven Birkerts commended
    Balakian's form and effect.

    "Peter Balakian's new book Ziggurat ingests calamity and dissolves
    it into an exhilarating rhythm and image, pushing the language until
    it feels like it's breaking into something new," Birkerts said. "It
    is a panorama of contemporary witness, but a syncopation of the same.

    Balakian renders scenes and at the same time enacts the sensi­bility
    being breached and affected - 9/11 is just short-hand for our new
    magnitudes of violence and dissociation ... the work aims to reveal
    the human capacity to integrate and, after hard passage, transcend."

    Sadiq Akoriji, who reviewed Ziggurat for Library Journal, admired
    Balakian's com­mand of language, calling the book, "Aes­thetically
    rich and engaging; recommended for all serious poetry readers."

    "Balakian ... here portrays a panoramic world that throbs radiantly
    with history, poli­tics, art, myth, and music, even as it conveys the
    contours of day-to-day life," Akoriji said in his review. "Throughout,
    he uses concrete detail and historical fact without succumbing to
    dogma ... Balakian's poems create a world sustained by the power
    of associations, in which borders get thinned out and lives that
    seem unconnected flow on each other. Even as he focuses on his
    relationship with the world, he avoids indulging in monologue,
    instead using reportorial diction to sketch flashes of scenes that
    seem as if they are taken by cameras with cracked lenses."

    Balakian has been a prolific writer since he first began teaching
    at Colgate Univer­sity in 1980. His previous works include the
    award-winning memoir: Black Dog of Fate (1997), the New York Times
    Bestsell­ing historical work: The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide
    and America's Response and the critically acclaimed book of poems:
    June-Tree: New and Selected Poems.

    Balakian is currently working on a new book of poems and a book
    of essays.




    From: A. Papazian
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